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NYT Opinion: The Iran War Might Be an 'Everything War' Posted on April 29, 2026 at 10:56:36 PM by cutter
The Iran War Might Be an ‘Everything War’
April 29, 2026, 3:00 p.m. ET
By David Wallace-Wells
Opinion Writer
The New York Times
At this point in the Iraq war, President George W. Bush had already unfurled his “Mission Accomplished” banner. In this, the third gulf war, we have now passed through the end of a two-week cease-fire and into an ambiguous period in which neither military has re-engaged in earnest but the Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed, with few ships passing through and months of minesweeping required.
What will happen next? Probably not a return to the open warfare of March and April, given that eight weeks of war already put the global economy in a vise, given the way that Iran quickly established an asymmetric advantage, and given the fact that those weeks of fighting left some critical American munitions stockpiles drained by more than half. Certainly not a forever war like those the United States fought in the 2000s and 2010s: without a shocking strategic reversal, there will be no boots on the ground this time, let alone an open-ended occupation. But President Trump is now preparing for an extended blockade, and already the fallout from America’s misbegotten military adventure seems to be visible everywhere you look, with consequences both intended and unintended playing out well beyond the Persian Gulf, where so much of the world’s supply chains lie, leaving no part of the global economy untouched and few people on the planet unaffected. Call it an everything war. Even a peace agreement probably won’t bring it to an end.
You most likely know the broad strokes of the story about energy. Perhaps a billion barrels of oil have been sucked out of the market, and some of the world’s largest fossil fuel production and export facilities have been damaged or taken offline. The futures price for oil is about 50 percent higher than it was before the war, and out in the real world, actual barrels jumped in price by even more. Countries across Asia, Africa and Europe have instituted emergency responses — Covid-style work-from-home policies and four-day work weeks, for instance, factories curbing production and gas stations limiting the amount of fuel dispensed to customers. Americans have spent almost $15 billion extra on gas — $114 per household — since the war began. Demand for American oil has exploded, and profit expectations for fossil fuel companies along with it. In Europe, the cost of importing fossil fuels has grown more than $30 billion over two months. The continent has “maybe six weeks or so” of jet fuel left, the International Energy Agency warned a couple of weeks ago; Lufthansa just cut 20,000 flights to save fuel; and, in the United States, low-cost airlines are staring down the possibility of bankruptcy. “Global energy markets are on the verge of a disaster,” The Economist declared last week, with near-term scenarios ranging “from bad to awful.”
The fate of food may prove grimmer. Much of the world’s fertilizer flows through the Strait of Hormuz alongside oil and gas, and because the war began just as planting season began in the Northern Hemisphere, it has also given us what The Financial Times has called “the coming global food crisis.” The price of fertilizer has jumped about 20 percent since the war began, and in the United States, 70 percent of farmers say they can’t afford enough of it. In total, input costs for food producers jumped 7.9 percent in April, and though it takes time for those prices to hit consumers, in Britain, they’re warning about 10 percent food inflation this year. With hunger, dire warnings are sometimes followed by only muted suffering, after markets recalibrate and philanthropy steps in. But last year, for the first time this century, the World Food Program declared two simultaneous famines, in Gaza and Sudan. Last month, it projected that the Iran war could push 45 million more people into what it calls “acute hunger.” The risk of famine has soared, especially in war-torn South Sudan.
Other downstream consequences are a bit less obvious, but so much stuff passes through the Strait of Hormuz that an extended closure pinches in many unexpected places. The world’s top condom maker is raising prices by 30 percent in response to shocks to the supply of synthetic rubber and silicone oil, for instance. There is already a shortage of Diet Coke in India, because aluminum price spikes have meant the country cannot manufacture cans for it. There may also be a carbonation shock, which is why Britain has announced an emergency $134 million restart of a mothballed industrial plant to produce CO2. The rising cost of helium means it is more expensive to run M.R.I. machines, which are cooled by the gas, which is also critical to the manufacturing of semiconductors, which is one reason The Financial Times has warned the war could derail the global A.I. boom. Minerals stalled on tankers in the region are a problem for the manufacturing of jet engines, microprocessors and drones. Global pharmaceutical supply has been pinched, too, with the price of some drugs surging 20 or 30 percent abroad. And though the logic of fossil fuel shortages means that the war is accelerating the world’s green transition, other aspects of the war are working in the other direction, with inputs for batteries and wind turbines and solar panels all trapped — at least for now.
The war has already pushed U.S. inflation near a two-year high, and some analysis suggests it has a lot higher to go. Interest-rate cuts that were expected this year, by a new Trump toady installed as chair of the Federal Reserve, appear to be much less likely. Economic forecasts for the United States and the world have chopped 20 or 30 basis points off G.D.P. growth for 2026. In Bangladesh, the banks are already “practically bankrupt,” the finance minister says, and the U.A.E. is begging the United States for a financial lifeline. Elsewhere in the gulf, exports have fallen as much as 90 percent and economies are projected to contract as much as 9 percent. Farther afield, few emerging markets look especially safe, and there are signs of possible economic crisis in Egypt, in Pakistan, in Sri Lanka.
And then are the geopolitics. In Europe, they are talking about a NATO without America. In the United States, it seems considerably harder to believe that the American military might be capable of defending Taiwan against a Chinese invasion, given how much damage Iran managed to do to American bases and planes. The war has scrambled regional alliances around the gulf, with many countries less sure that the United States represents a reassuring military umbrella than an unreliable chaos agent — and now the U.A.E. quitting OPEC, illustrating a longstanding fault line between the Emiratis and the Saudis. The sovereign wealth funds that have backstopped so much of American venture capital for years appear to be growing more cautious with their money, imperiling a lot of Silicon Valley financing and some vanity spending, too (the Saudi government’s backing out of a deal that would have supported the Met Opera, for instance). The Houthis are willing to weaponize the Red Sea and have staked claims to the Bab al-Mandab Strait, and the world’s dizzying network of supply chains now seems full of many more strategically vulnerable choke points. No one knows what the future holds for cities like Dubai, which sold themselves as regional safe havens and holograms of a gleaming modern future, and as soon as the war began, there were analysts forecasting the end of the “petrodollar”— as the economist Mona Ali did, in a memorable essay in the magazine Equator that also identified the Iran war as marking the end of American hegemony.
From a certain vantage, the illegal and counterproductive war is a sign of the end of American pre-eminence. The American military has been humbled, the Pentagon planning committees humiliated, the global reputation of the United States tattered and the prospects for a reboot of global leadership, of the kind achieved by Barack Obama and to a lesser extent Joe Biden, are now considerably dimmer.
But from another vantage, however much damage U.S. primacy appears to have sustained, the war looks — at least for now — like a perverse confirmation of American power. After all, it was the United States that made all this mess — without real cause and without generating all that much pushback of substance on the world stage. You can’t call the campaign a strategic success, given how poorly articulated the goals were at the outset, how little the United States has gained from its hostility, and how much needless turmoil and suffering it has imposed on the world as a whole. But it is also the kind of mess only a global superpower could make — if one lashing out in response to its own perceptions of decline.
The state of play calls to mind all the talk of polycrisis and permacrisis and multipolarity toward the end of the pandemic emergency a few years back. But if the polycrisis is a sticky global spiderweb, the United States is still the biggest spider. The entire world is now being held hostage by American aggression, burdened by cascading economic turmoil that most Americans are, by global standards, insulated from — by geography, by energy independence, by wealth. A few weeks ago, the former Russian president Dmitri Medvedev described Iran’s Hormuz “weapon” as the equivalent of a nuclear arsenal. But by and large those suffering around the world don’t blame the new ayatollah or the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps for their plight. They still see America as the author of this brutal and chaotic chapter in world history — and they are right to.